Myrkur's Folkesange: A Record Review

The fact that Amalie Bruun released her new album Folkesange under her Myrkur moniker is significant. In a career spanning a mere fourteen years, Bruun has recorded under three names, each projecting a different timbre of her musical voice. As a debut self-titled solo act, Bruun recorded a handful of schizophrenic singer-songwriter “pop” albums that paid homage to an array of artists spanning ABBA, Kate Bush, Bjork, The Beatles, and maybe early career Beyonce(?). These songs were musically quaint and lyrically juvenile, but not necessarily in a good way. In 2013 and 2014, Bruun formed Ex Cops with a forgettable and chisel-chinned male hipster. The duo released two either pop-rock or rock-pop (actually, there is a difference) LPs -- albums as sugary and delightfully easy to sip as chilled Capri-Suns by a mid-summer swimming hole. 

However, in 2014 Bruun also unleashed her greatest claim to clickbait fame when she was ousted as the one-woman black metal artist known only as Myrkur. The roar from the internet was both frightening and glorious, so much so that Bruun, like a “trve” black metaler, promptly set ablaze the cathedral of her pop career and her Ex Cops contract with ol’ what’s his face (see? forgettable). Two EPs, two LPs, a live album, and heaps of polarizing headlines later, Myrkur released Folkesange March 20 on Relapse Records, and in doing so reinvented herself again. But this time Bruun didn’t bother to change her stage name.  

Bias out of the bag: Folkesange -- currently my favorite album of 2020 -- is the Myrkur album I’ve longed for since that controversial 2014 self-titled EP. The Myrkur debut is not by any means a bad album; it just plays more like a question mark than a bold statement. And maybe that’s why I was drawn to it in a way that I’ve not been drawn to her other black metal releases since. Myrkur, with its choral arrangements halo-ing above slippery tremolo pickings, possesses an awkward static energy around its edges, as if Bruun is giddily bouncing outside the production booth murmuring, “Am I really allowed to do this?”. It sounds a bit like a pre-teen cussing for the first time: all the damn words are there, but it’s just off enough to be adorable. This past week I’ve played Myrkur on loop alongside Folkesange, and I have found the debut both equally inspiring and lacking. It feels like puberty strapped to wax. The image of an artist fantasizing transition.

Myrkur’s subsequent LPs are not as exciting. When news exploded that Myrkur was a woman -- A WOMAN!!! -- “kvlt” shit hit the fan. The firestorm was fierce and immediate. (Google it. People live wildly luscious lives if this is what implodes their world.) But it also put the match under Bruun. She immediately ditched Ex Cops and released a full-length Myrkur album titled M, an album that was ill-advised on all levels . . . except one. 

Beginning with 2015’s M, and even more on 2016’s Mareridt, Mykur began experimenting with traditional Danish folk instrumentation. Right there in the opener of M, Bruun introduces the knyckleharp alongside a romping forest band percussion. Her choral vocals soar over a guitar patch-work of heavy metal riffs and black metal tremolos before simmering into an erratic, serpentine hurdy-gurdy like dream-cycle of cymbal footed unpleasantry. It’s the first true statement Bruun made as a musical artist. Unfortunately, it’s one she stutters and trips over like a too-quick tongue twister for two albums. But Myrkur’s message in that opening track was clear: black metal is folk music and folk music, when played earnestly, is very black metal.

This is why Bruun’s release of Folkesange as a Myrkur record is so significant. Since 2014, Bruun has attempted to amplify a folk-ish voice through a black metal filter. But on Folkesange, Myrkur finally leans fully into her Danish folk heritage and classical music training. The result is an album more confident and more conviction ladened than anything she’s released so far, as if the question she asked on the Mykur debut is answered here. It’s also a freaking beautiful record. The kind of beautiful that stops you in your tracks and makes you take notice. (After recommending it to a few music loving students, one said, “I closed my eyes and saw dragons and castles.” That’s high praise.) Story songs (“Leaves of Yggsdrasil” and “Ramund”) slide into dance numbers (“Fager so en Ros” and “Svea”), interspersed with spell-casting mountain spine tinglers (“Tor i Helheim” and “Harpens Kraft”) and even a classic Joan Baez number (“House Carpenter”). The bookends -- opening vocal dirge “Ella” and lullaby closer “Vinter” -- greet and release the listener like a trustworthy narrator. From the outset, I am fully present in this record. At the close, I am instantly nostalgic for landscapes my feet have never touched.

Surely, Danish folk music purists have a “trve kvlt” that will eat Folkesange the same way black metal babies diapered the Myrkur debut. Sure and sure. But I’m not that guy. I’m just a delightfully bewitched Myrkur fan, swooning on the kulning calls and choral arrangements of a voice that’s finally found itself. For a long-time listener, nothing could be more satisfying.